Last month, Malawi Writers Union (Mawu) announced a national short story competition for both seasoned writers and secondary school students.
This year’s contest focuses on mental health and artificial intelligence.
The theme does not only focus on topical and contemporary issues, but also requires everyone to take a deeper look at our society and ask tough questions: How are we treating those struggling silently? What stories are we telling about the minds in trouble and the machines of the future?
This literary initiative coincides with a major shift in our laws—the decriminalisation of attempted suicide in Malawi.
This month, Parliament passed a bill repealing Section229 of the Penal Code that criminalised attempted suicide.
For decades, anyone who survived suicide was liable to criminal charges and imprisonment regardless of their mental and emotional crisis. The judgemental law left no room for empathy.
This proposed law waiting for President Lazarus Chakwera’s signature signals a crucial shift in our collective consciousness.
Mental health advocates have said for years that a suicide attempt is not a crime—it is a cry for help.
True, most people who attempt suicide often feel trapped, isolated and hopeless. They are not seeking attention, but relief from pain words cannot express.
Many reach that point having spent months, even years, battling thoughts they didn’t know how to share. Those who reach out often get ridiculed or dismissed as too weak.
The Bill approved by Parliament aligns Malawi with modern understandings of mental health as a medical and social issue, not a moral failing.
It urges us to treat those who attempt suicide as patients in need of urgent support.
But laws alone cannot change culture. That is where writers, poets, musicians, dramatists must step in.
Through the Mawu short story competition, creative writers can paint the emotional realities behind mental illness.
A short story can breathe life into statistics and policies. It can humanise depression, anxiety, trauma and loneliness in ways that reports or sermons cannot.
In doing so, storytelling is not just an art, but an advocacy too.
Writers have a special task to speak for those too burdened to speak for themselves and to imagine characters who mirror real people.
It is time to share the untold stories of students haunted by cyber-bullying, the youth crushed by unemployment, women enduring silent abuse and children yearning for someone to just ask: Are you okay?
Stories allow us to enter the minds of others. If we do that well, we may finally begin to understand that mental illness is not someone else’s problem, but a human catastrophe that happen every day in our families, workplaces, classrooms and places of worship.
Artists, like the politicians who make laws, shape public perceptions.
A well-told story can stay in someone’s heart long after a campaign ends or a law is passed. It can start conversations in households, classrooms, places of worship and marketplaces. It can even save a life.
Now that the law has changed, what next? Our health system must be prepared to provide quality mental health services not just in cities, but across rural communities.
Teachers need training to detect signs of distress. Religious and community leaders must promote messages of inclusion and healing. Parents must learn to listen without rushing to discipline or denial.
If the President assents to the Bill, it will mark a historic shift in our legal system. But the real work will happen in homes, workplaces, schools, clinics, churches and in stories we share.
That is where healing begins.
As Malawi embraces the new shift in the handling of mental health, writers must not remain silent.
Its time for storytellers to shine a light on the silent battles fought behind closed doors.
Now more than ever, literature must rise to meet life. By exploring themes of mental health with honesty, writers can contribute to a growing body of literature that speaks not just to policy, but to the heart.
